Ashish Kumar Awadhiya

Abstract

Employers are one of the major stakeholders of higher education and they expect that Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) should provide them with job ready graduates. However, this expectation is not being met and employers are continuously struggling to find suitable graduates with contemporary employability skills. Employers across the globe are facing difficulty in finding graduates with required employability. It is very much importance for the HEIs to regularly interact with employers so that they understand the contemporary demands of the industry and update their curricula and strategies to impart the relevant IT skills to their graduates, so as to make them employable and bridge the employability gaps. This paper aims to analyze views of the employers (N=82) on existence of skill gap between the available employability skills among graduates and the skills desired by the employers. The result of the survey reveals that employers are in the agreement about existence of employability skill gap. It is also observed that there is need of more collaboration between industry and academia to bridge this gap and the higher education system need to adopt alternative strategies to bride this skill gaps. The results also suggest that HEIs need to adopt the strategies suggested by employers as innovative practices in their learner support services.

Keywords- Employability Skills, Employers, Higher Education, Graduates